School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemAustralia’s ‘Asian Century’: Time, Space and Public Culture(Japan Focus, 2015-02-10)In this essay we consider ongoing public-cultural discussions about Australia’s situation in ‘the Asian century’ as symptomatic of a conjunctural moment in Australian social life: a historical phase that is given distinctive shape by the convergence of the discourses of paranoid nationalism and free-market (inter)nationalism. We argue that the co-existence of these two (deeply contradictory) imaginaries as the dominant available rubrics for configuring ‘Australia’ and ‘Asia’ in relation to each other results in a profoundly impoverished understanding of current conditions. We propose that an account of some very differently configured relationships between ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia,’ drawn from people’s material experiences of everyday cultural life, can provide resources for those interested in thinking beyond the hyperbole of economic opportunism and the paralysis of paranoid nationalism. We begin by briefly considering ostensibly progressive innovations in governmental and public-cultural framings of the Asia-Australia relationship since the late twentieth century–– ‘Asia as market’ and ‘Asia literacy’––before turning to some stories that we argue offer much richer resources. These stories include our remembered experiences of late 20th-century Australian children’s media––always-already infused with a certain Japanese flavor. We also consider the contemporary translocal experiences of Asian Australians, Chinese international students in Australian cities, and Asian-Australian media and research collaborations. Such phenomena, we argue, constitute Australian social life as translocal and inter-cultural, thereby fundamentally challenging the presumed radical separateness of ‘Australia’ from ‘Asia’ on which currently dominant framings of Australia’s situation in the ‘Asian century’ are founded.
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Item'Race portraits' and vernacular possibilities: heritage and culture(Cambridge University Press, 2001)'Heritage' is a term both broad and slippery. Beyond the literal meaning of property passed between generations, its contemporary evocations include 'inherited customs, beliefs and institutions held in common by a nation or community . . . [and] natural and "built" landscapes, buildings and environments held in trust for future generations' (Davison et. al. 1998, p. 308). Even this elemental definition strongly associates cultural institutions and heritage. Most cultural institutions articulate inherited customs and beliefs through a sense of heritage which, in turn, certifies their authenticity and legitimacy. Parliamentary conventions, halls of fame and honour boards, much judicial ritual, the use of uniforms, anniversary commemorations of all sorts and university degree conferring ceremonies are strong examples of such practices. At the same time the more material and codified notion of heritage as things held in trust explicitly organises the work of many cultural institutions.
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ItemChained to their signs: remembering breastplates(Pluto Press, 2001)At first glance, breastplates might seem to be just another device in the technology of colonial capture in Australia. Take the photograph of Bilin Bilin wearing a plate inscribed 'Jackey Jackey - King of the Logan and Pimpama'. The plate, the chain and the conventions of photography produce a Yugambeh elder as a shackled criminal on display - he is both a primitive in tableau and one of 'the usual suspects'. The image seems to both document captivity and evoke those 'frontier photographs' of Aboriginal prisoners in the desert bound together with heavy chains attached to manacles around their necks. This initial impression is right in that it recognizes some of the ways in which colonial captivity is not only about actual imprisonment but equally about how captivity is understood, represented, interpreted and made historical. Still, in this chapter I want to persuade you that breastplates and photographs of breastplates performed other roles: as cross-cultural objects and signs.
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ItemIntroduction(Cambridge University Press, 1997)As a collection of British colonies and then a nation, Australia came into existence as a product of both colonialism and modernity; proud of its fancied youth and eager for the fruits of civilisation, enamoured with progress yet yearning for tradition. Historical accounts of Australia have equally been products of colonialism and modernity. More often than not, the mission of history has been to remember the triumph of colonising a continent and forming a modern nation state with destiny on its side. While the historical legacies of colonialism and modernity remain palpable, many of the dreams of colonialism and modernity lie in ruins. This is a book from these 'ruins' in the sense that it discusses both the colonial past of former colonies and the colonising of indigenous people in Australia. But ruins are never simply gone or in the past; ruins are enduring traces; spaces of romantic fancies and forgetfulness where social memories imagine the persistence of time in records of destruction. Thus this book is about the past in the present, it is written from within contemporary cultures of history. It moves from Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal accounts of Captain Cook, jumps to the installation of history in museums and school curricula, glides through the historiography of archetypal historical events. This is a book with strong hopes for history and social memory. My interest is not in hammering home the constructedness of history, nor in the important task of diversifying and proliferating accounts of neglected historical actors but in thinking historically about existing social memory. It is a gesture towards learning to inhabit landscapes of memory which are, in part, landscapes littered with ruins; some archaic and others nightmarish, some quaint simulations and others desperate echoes. I imagine such a landscape of memories not as homeless place for lost souls but a ground from which new flights of historical imagination might depart and to which they might return, differently.
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ItemExperiments in culture: an introduction(Monash University ePress, 2006)The last two decades have witnessed an explosion in the development of new public and private museums throughout the world. If this is surprising it is only because, for much of the last 50 years, museums have been regarded by many scholars and cultural critics as, if not extinct, then certainly archaic institutions far from the cutting edge of cultural innovation. This judgment is being proved wrong across the globe as innovative and distinctive museums are staking out new territory for themselves as vital, dynamic, public and civic cultural institutions. Nowhere is this most striking than in the South Pacific where large, new or significantly expanded public museums and cultural centres have opened since the 1990s, including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the National Museum of Australia, the Melbourne Museum, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Museum of Sydney, the Gab Titui Cultural Centre in the Torres Strait, the Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. Many more museums in that region have undertaken major renovations. South Pacific museums: Experiments in culture brings together a collection of outstanding analysis of these museums by cultural, museum and architectural critics, and historians. A series of snapshots introduces the reader to key museums in the region while the essays explore these museum developments in the broadest possible terms. The museums under analysis are part of the complex field of heritage, where national economies meet global tourism, where cities brand themselves, where indigeneity articulates with colonialism, where exhibitionary technologies and pedagogies meet entertainment, where histories are fought over, where local identities intersect with academic and popular knowledge, where objects and provenance are displayed and contested, where remembering and forgetting dance their endless dance.
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ItemMeatworkers' memories: the mnemonics of the nose(Department of History, University of Melbourne, 1994)It is entirely proper that I have travelled from Melbourne to Sydney to present a few thoughts on memory, history and smell. The first time I visited Sydney as an adult was at the end of a surfing safari along the coast from Melbourne. As we came into the metropolitan area four of us were in what might loosely be described as high spirits. I was driving, and the portable tape-recorder was probably playing one of those tuneful post-punk numbers that tended to be our favourites at the time. Elisa was the most excited of us all. She had spent some of her childhood in Sydney, and had not been back for many years. Going along one of the freeways that carve through the hills south of the city, I looked over to the passenger seat and was startled by a pair of legs. Elisa had not so much put her head out of the window as she was out the window, sitting on the door frame and hanging on to the roof-rack. She was laughing and sniffing and yelling, all at the same time. "Breathe . . . Breathe. Can't you smell it . . . can't you smell it!" Once we got her back in the car we agreed – yes, we could smell this place that for Elisa came with memories of smells and for us was a brand new sensation.
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ItemMoving around: an interview with Stephen Muecke( 1999)Moving around: an interview with Stephen Muecke. HEALY: Reading the country, the book you coauthored in 1984 with Krim Benterrak and Paddy Roe, is dedicated ‘to the nomads of Broome, always there and always on the move’. What do you make of that dedication now? MUEKE: When I worked in the Kimberley in the late seventies and through the eighties I was experiencing a frontier complex of cultures. Land rights were under negotiation. For nearly a hundred years whitefellas had been ‘settling’ and imposing pastoral and mining economies of exploitation; blackfellas were being displaced yet had obviously always belonged. Whitefellas and Asians were part of diasporic movements. People were moving around a lot, in modes quite unlike, say, suburban commuting.
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Item'We know your mob now': histories and their cultures( 1990)Which of our traditions we want to carry on and which we do not is decided in the public process of transmitting a culture. The less we are able to rely on a triumphal national history, on the seamless normality of what has come to prevail, and the more clearly we are conscious of the ambivalence of every tradition, the more intense are the disputes about this process of cultural transmission. For a long time Aboriginal history was an impossibility. History was both the product and the self-contemplation of European civilization. Aborigines were allowed to have myths, for myth is one of the great markers of the primitive, but history they had not. True knowledge of the past was knowledge of white Australia and reserved for white Australians.
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ItemHistories and collecting: museums, objects and memories(Oxford University Press, 1994)I want to explore the question of how we might understand the museum in relation to collection and memory. This is one approach to much more general issues around the rules, modes and rhythms of social memory. The capacity of institutions like the museum have, in general, been radically undervalued in thinking about memory.
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ItemA symptomatic museum: the new, the NMA and the culture wars( 2004-11)The National Museum of Australia’s preference for the everyday and affect is prominent in its signature exhibition, Eternity. Announced with the tag, “Stories from the emotional heart of Australia”, Eternity is meant to be immediately accessible to visitors, offering a unique experience, both sentimental and nostalgic. Eschewing objects and facts, the display names and seeks to evoke a series of sensations, feelings and emotions. Ten of these, including “Fear”, “Joy”, “Thrill”, and “Mystery”, provide the core themes which encourage visitors to interact subjectively with the Museum; to relate to the stories and images on display through, and as part of, their own personal, anecdotal, and everyday experiences. Arthur Stace is the central character in this exhibition. Although identifying closely with his hometown of Sydney, the NMA nominates Mr Stace as a national icon because of his practice of repeatedly writing the single word “eternity” in chalk on city pavements over many years. This exhibition is directive in nature. It indicates the key strategies used throughout the Museum, and demonstrates the disposition that should be adopted by visitors as they travel through the Museum. The injunction to participate, “you’re invited”, provides a space for the visitor to occupy: this is where we belong. By opening up an experience for visitors to respond to subjectively, the Museum articulates its pedagogical imperative that meaning is produced through the active and emotional engagement of the visitor with the material and stories on display.